The danger of building strong narratives on weak data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by John Burn-Murdoch: “Measuring gross domestic product is extremely complicated. Around the world, national statistics offices are struggling to get the sums right the first time around.

Some struggle more than others. When Ireland first reported its estimate for GDP growth in Q1 2015, it came in at 1.4 per cent. One year later, and with some fairly unique distortions due to its location as headquarters for many US big tech and pharma companies, this was revised upwards to an eye-watering 21.4 per cent.

On average, five years after an estimate of quarterly Irish GDP growth is first published, the latest revision of that figure is two full percentage points off the original value. The equivalent for the UK is almost 10 times smaller at 0.25 percentage points, making the ONS’s initial estimates among the most accurate in the developed world, narrowly ahead of the US at 0.26 and well ahead of the likes of Japan (0.46) and Norway (0.56).

But it’s not just the size of revisions that matters, it’s the direction. Out of 24 developed countries that consistently report quarterly GDP revisions to the OECD, the UK’s initial estimates are the most pessimistic. Britain’s quarterly growth figures typically end up 0.15 percentage points higher than first thought. The Germans go up by 0.07 on average, the French by 0.04, while the Americans, ever optimistic, typically end up revising their estimates down by 0.11 percentage points.

In other words, next time you hear a set of quarterly growth figures, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to mentally add 0.15 to the UK one and subtract 0.11 from the US.

This may all sound like nerdy detail, but it matters because people graft strong narratives on to this remarkably flimsy data. Britain was the only G7 economy yet to rebound past pre-Covid levels until it wasn’t. Ireland is booming, apparently, except its actual individual consumption per capita — a much better measure of living standards than GDP — has fallen steadily from just above the western European average in 2007 to 10 per cent below last year.

And the phenomenon is not exclusive to economic data. Two years ago, progressives critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic took to calling the UK “Plague Island”, citing Britain’s reported Covid death rates, which were among the highest in the developed world. But with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Britain was simply better at counting its deaths than most countries…(More)”

Guess who’s getting the world’s first self-sovereign national digital ID?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Durga M Sengupta: “Bhutan — a small Himalayan nation with less than 800,000 people — has decided to roll out a national digital identity system for all its citizens. “National digital ID is the platform on which digitization and online services of banks to hospitals to taxation to universities, everything can come online with 100% assurance,” Ujjwal Deep Dahal, CEO of Druk Holding and Investments, the commercial and investment arm of the government which developed the system, told me over a video call from the capital city of Thimphu.

The national ID system has been built using blockchain technology, which will provide each individual a “self-sovereign” identity, meaning it can only be controlled by the citizen and no other entity, similar to how cryptocurrencies work.

The country’s 7-year-old crown prince, Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck, was the first to enroll in the new system, and it is expected to reach the rest of the population within the year, Dahal said. 

“Once I’m onboarded, the interesting part about self-sovereign identity is that only I have my verified credentials in my wallet, in my phone. Nobody has access to it thereon but me, not even the government,” he said. The onboarding process takes about 5 seconds, Dahal estimated. “In our system, you will not visit any booth to register yourself. You’ll just download an app; share your details, selfie, and national ID card; and in the back end, the AI algorithm will run and say, ‘Okay, I can give you a verified credential,’” he said. This timeline would differ for people who don’t have smartphones or require assistance.

Druk Holding and Investments has been instrumental in setting up various other parallel projects, including the recently announced Bhutanverse — a metaverse that displays Bhutanese art, architecture, and motifs…(More)”. See also: Field Report: On the Emergent Use of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Identity Management

Interoperability Can Save the Open Web

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by Michael Nolan: “In his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, author Cory Doctorow presents a strong case for disrupting Big Tech. While the dominance of Internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon is often taken for granted, Doctorow argues that these walled gardens are fenced in by legal structures, not feats of engineering. Doctorow proposes forcing interoperability—any given platform’s ability to interact with another—as a way to break down those walls and to make the Internet freer and more democratic….

Doctorow: At its root, it’s just the ability to use one thing with something else. Use any ink in your printer with any paper, use any socks with your shoes, anyone’s gasoline in your car, put any lightbulb in your light socket. There’s voluntary, mandatory interoperability, where a group of stakeholders get together and they say, “This is the goal we want all of our products to achieve, and we are going to design a framework so that we can make sure that every lightbulb lights up when you stick it in a light socket.” Then there’s the stuff where they’re indifferent: Car companies don’t stop you from putting a little cigarette-lighter-to-USB adapter into your car.

Companies can grow very quickly because tech has got these great network effects, but they also have, because of interoperability, really low switching costs.—Cory Doctorow

Then there’s the third kind of interop, the kind of chewy, interesting, lots-of-rich-Internet-history interop, which is adversarial interoperability, which in the book we call “comcom,” short for competitive compatibility. It’s the interop that’s done against the wishes of the original equipment manufacturer: scraping, reverse engineering, bots, all of that gnarly stuff done in the face of active hostility. This would be like Apple reverse-engineering Microsoft Office and making the iWork suite—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—so that anyone with a Mac could read any Windows-based office file without having to buy any software from Microsoft.

There are so many examples of this from technology’s history. It’s really the engine of technology…(More)”. 

Crafting the future: involving young people in urban design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alastair Bailey: “About 60 per cent of urban populations will be under 18 years of age by 2030, according to UN Habitat, but attempts to involve young people in the design of their cities remain in their infancy. Efforts to enlist this generation have often floundered due to a range of problems — not least an unwillingness to listen to their needs.

“The actual involvement of young people in planning is negligible” says Simeon Shtebunaev, a Birmingham City University doctoral researcher in youth and town planning and researcher at urban social enterprise Social Life. However, new technologies offer a way forward. Digitisation has come to be seen as a “panacea to youth engagement” in many cities, notes Shtebunaev.

Hargeisa, the largest city of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa and home to 1.5mn people, has already been demonstrating what can be achieved by digitally engaging with young people — notably through the Minecraft video game. This enables users to design and build structures in a manner similar to expensive 3D modelling software.

Despite large-scale reconstruction, the city still bears the scars of the 1981-91 civil war, during which former Somalian dictator Said Barre sought to wipe out members of the city’s dominant Isaaq clan to enforce his own rule. Up to an estimated 200,000 Isaaq died.

In September 2019, though, “Urban Visioning Week” brought Hargeisa residents together over five days to discuss the city’s future as part of the UN’s Joint Programme on Local Governance. The aim was for residents to identify the city’s problems and what improvements they felt were needed…(More)”.

Wartime Digital Resilience

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Gulsanna Mamediieva: “Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, technology was already a growing part of the Ukrainian economy and was central to the government’s vision to reimagine the way citizens and businesses interact with the state in the digital era: paperless, cashless, and without bureaucracy. Even before the conflict, we in government believed that technology holds the promise of making government more transparent, efficient, and accountable, empower citizens, increase participation, and combat corruption.

However, technology has become even more central to helping the country defend itself and mitigate the effect of Russian attacks on civilians. As a result, Ukraine has emerged as a leading example of digital innovation and resilience in the face of challenges, particularly through its gov-tech solutions, using digital governance capacities to maintain basic governance functions in crisis situations and showing a strong case for digital public innovation to support its people. Digital government plays a central role in Ukraine’s ability to continue to fight for its very existence and respond to the aggressor…(More)”

Advancing Environmental Justice with AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Justina Nixon-Saintil: “Given its capacity to innovate climate solutions, the technology sector could provide the tools we need to understand, mitigate, and even reverse the damaging effects of global warming. In fact, addressing longstanding environmental injustices requires these companies to put the newest and most effective technologies into the hands of those on the front lines of the climate crisis.

Tools that harness the power of artificial intelligence, in particular, could offer unprecedented access to accurate information and prediction, enabling communities to learn from and adapt to climate challenges in real time. The IBM Sustainability Accelerator, which we launched in 2022, is at the forefront of this effort, supporting the development and scaling of projects such as the Deltares Aquality App, an AI-powered tool that helps farmers assess and improve water quality. As a result, farmers can grow crops more sustainably, prevent runoff pollution, and protect biodiversity.

Consider also the challenges that smallholder farmers face, such as rising costs, the difficulty of competing with larger producers that have better tools and technology, and, of course, the devastating effects of climate change on biodiversity and weather patterns. Accurate information, especially about soil conditions and water availability, can help them address these issues, but has historically been hard to obtain…(More)”.

AI and new standards promise to make scientific data more useful by making it reusable and accessible

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bradley Wade Bishop: “…AI makes it highly desirable for any data to be machine-actionable – that is, usable by machines without human intervention. Now, scholars can consider machines not only as tools but also as potential autonomous data reusers and collaborators.

The key to machine-actionable data is metadata. Metadata are the descriptions scientists set for their data and may include elements such as creator, date, coverage and subject. Minimal metadata is minimally useful, but correct and complete standardized metadata makes data more useful for both people and machines.

It takes a cadre of research data managers and librarians to make machine-actionable data a reality. These information professionals work to facilitate communication between scientists and systems by ensuring the quality, completeness and consistency of shared data.

The FAIR data principles, created by a group of researchers called FORCE11 in 2016 and used across the world, provide guidance on how to enable data reuse by machines and humans. FAIR data is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable – meaning it has robust and complete metadata.

In the past, I’ve studied how scientists discover and reuse data. I found that scientists tend to use mental shortcuts when they’re looking for data – for example, they may go back to familiar and trusted sources or search for certain key terms they’ve used before. Ideally, my team could build this decision-making process of experts and remove as many biases as possible to improve AI. The automation of these mental shortcuts should reduce the time-consuming chore of locating the right data…(More)”.

How to improve economic forecasting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nicholas Gruen: “Today’s four-day weather forecasts are as accurate as one-day forecasts were 30 years ago. Economic forecasts, on the other hand, aren’t noticeably better. Former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke should ponder this in his forthcoming review of the Bank of England’s forecasting.

There’s growing evidence that we can improve. But myopia and complacency get in the way. Myopia is an issue because economists think technical expertise is the essence of good forecasting when, actually, two things matter more: forecasters’ understanding of the limits of their expertise and their judgment in handling those limits.

Enter Philip Tetlock, whose 2005 book on geopolitical forecasting showed how little experts added to forecasting done by informed non-experts. To compare forecasts between the two groups, he forced participants to drop their vague weasel words — “probably”, “can’t be ruled out” — and specify exactly what they were forecasting and with what probability. 

That started sorting the sheep from the goats. The simple “point forecasts” provided by economists — such as “growth will be 3.0 per cent” — are doubly unhelpful in this regard. They’re silent about what success looks like. If I have forecast 3.0 per cent growth and actual growth comes in at 3.2 per cent — did I succeed or fail? Such predictions also don’t tell us how confident the forecaster is.

By contrast, “a 70 per cent chance of rain” specifies a clear event with a precise estimation of the weather forecaster’s confidence. Having rigorously specified the rules of the game, Tetlock has since shown how what he calls “superforecasting” is possible and how diverse teams of superforecasters do even better. 

What qualities does Tetlock see in superforecasters? As well as mastering necessary formal techniques, they’re open-minded, careful, curious and self-critical — in other words, they’re not complacent. Aware, like Socrates, of how little they know, they’re constantly seeking to learn — from unfolding events and from colleagues…(More)”.

Reimagining Our High-Tech World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Mike Kubzansky: “…Channeling the power of technology for the good of society requires a shared vision of an ideal society. Despite the country’s increasing polarization, most Americans agree on the principles of a representative democracy and embrace the three quintessential rights inscribed in the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Freedom and individual liberty, including freedom of speech, religion, and assembly and the right to privacy, are fundamental to most people’s expectations for this country, as are equality for all citizens, a just legal system, and a strong economy. Widespread consensus also exists around giving children a strong start in life; ensuring access to basic necessities like health care, food, and housing; and taking care of the planet.

By deliberately building a digital tech system guided by these values, society has an opportunity to advance its interests and future-proof the digital tech system for better outcomes.

Such collective action requires a broad conversation about what kind of society Americans want and how digital technology fits into that vision. To initiate this discussion, I suggest five questions philanthropists, technologists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, academics, advocates, movement leaders, students, consumers, investors, and everyone else who has a stake in the nation’s future need to start asking—now….(More)”.

It’s like jury duty, but for getting things done

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hollie Russon Gilman and Amy Eisenstein: “Citizens’ assemblies have the potential to repair our broken politics…Imagine a democracy where people come together and their voices are heard and are translated directly into policy. Frontline workers, doctors, teachers, friends, and neighbors — young and old — are brought together in a random, representative sample to deliberate the most pressing issues facing our society. And they are compensated for their time.

The concept may sound radical. But we already use this method for jury duty. Why not try this widely accepted practice to tackle the deepest, most crucial, and most divisive issues facing our democracy?

The idea — known today as citizens’ assemblies — originated in ancient Athens. Instead of a top-down government, Athens used sortition — a system that was horizontal and distributive. The kleroterion, an allotment machine, randomly selected citizens to hold civic office, ensuring that the people had a direct say in their government’s dealings….(More)”.